Category: technology
Chaos to Clarity: PYP Practitioner Checklist for Synchronized and Asynchronized Learning

Chaos to Clarity: PYP Practitioner Checklist for Synchronized and Asynchronized Learning

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Six months. Half a year. 

That’s been the length of this experience, and, as the Covid-19 numbers are not abating, the “finish line” is not in sight. Shutting ourselves up in our homes and pivoting suddenly has been quite agonizing. When schools all had to suddenly go online, we scrambled to figure out the technology to continue learning.  Very few schools had the systems in place to support a smooth transition and while we trained teachers, we also had to train families and students. But here we are. 

I think about the gifts that are “wrapped up in sandpaper” from this collective experience. The prize chief among this is developing resiliency, in which I can build mental and emotional strength. There is a real possibility for ‘Post-traumatic’ growth. So when I look at that graphic, I can reflect on all the domains and see how I am for the better due to this pandemic.

And, although this has been hell, there has a great opportunity to turn this into a positive experience for us professionally. This is really a powerful moment when we are being confronted with what we truly believe about student learning and the role of the teacher. So we are really grappling with how to figure out how to create self-directed learning and do online learning really, really well. 

So, I feel one of the most important things I can do as a leader is to create clarity out of this confusion, provide structure despite the backdrop of turmoil and ambiguity.  Thus, when our school revised our online learning plan, I really wanted to define how we can do the PYP online because what we would have done over the course of a day now must be condensed into a handful of learning experiences.  I’ve developed an architecture around lesson planning for our teachers in order to support a meaningful and engaging learning experience for our students. For my new-to-the-PYP staff, I really wanted them to be able to name and notice the key areas of learning that we need to be planning for in our online learning program. Here is some of that thinking:

PYP Practitioner Checklist for Synchronized Learning

During this lesson, have I ….?

  • Lead with a Guiding Question so I can start with an inquiry stance
  • Developed a Concept 
  • Provided opportunities to grow one or more Approaches to Learning (Atls)
  • Cultivated the Learner Profile (in the guiding question or as a part of self-reflection)
  • Taught through interaction in order to honor Social Constructivism (dialogue brings new understanding)
  • Embedded Assessment

Structuring our lessons intentionally to “cover” this checklist will eventually lead teachers to develop “muscle memory” with practice. It’s important that teachers can name and notice these aspects of the PYP in daily synchronized lessons, which we conduct through the Zoom platform. We continue to reflect and refine how we teach our live lessons. 

But we also do a fair amount of learning through activities posted on SeeSaw. So, again, I have created another concise structure to delineate the elements that are important to cultivate self-navigating learners:

PYP Practitioner Checklist for Asynchronized Learning
  • Guiding Question (start with an inquiry-stance)
  • Concept Development
  • Success Criteria
  • Timely feedback

Here is an example of what a post looks like:

Although not stated in the checklist, teachers also have to include video, audio (translated into Portuguese), and visual instructions so that they can be successful in their learning. This is also included in our school’s online learning plan. 

As we continue to reflect and review our practices, I think these structures will serve us post-pandemic because it helps to develop teacher efficacy or as it is more commonly known as “competance”. They say that Practice makes progress, so I am hopeful that these structures facilitate the process of progressing from incompetence to competence as a skillful PYP practitioner.

So, in my heart, I want to support my teachers with this clarity and design frameworks for online learning that will help all our teachers, new or experienced into refining their ability to “make the PYP happen” online. Although this is not perfect, I believe it is a step forward in helping teachers and can act as a catalyst for the mindful practice of our pedagogical principles. 

 

Why is the Whole World Upside Down? Education After COVID-19 and #RemoteLearning

Why is the Whole World Upside Down? Education After COVID-19 and #RemoteLearning

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Lately, I’ve been reading and reflecting a lot about Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Somehow when I feel stressed, I turn to science as my security blanket. I feel comfort in the tested theories and proofs as if all of life’s unsolved mysteries can be explained with science. Surely, during these uncertain times, trying to figure out how we got here and where we go next is on everyone’s mind. Mine too.

Darwin’s theory is one that is easily misunderstood. Most people don’t know the backstory of how his theory came about and whether he actually agreed with his conjectures but we accept his ideas as a fact, by and large, and teach it in our textbooks. But his ideas are why the whole world is upside down.

The problem, whether we are aware of it or not, is that his ideas of “selection of the fittest” have paved the way for our economic principles and so much of the discrimination and atrocities in our human world–from civil wars and genocides, to acceptance of violence as a norm–justifying it as our primal urge to compete for scare resources and force “natural selection”. We’ve accepted his ideas because it was the first attempt of describing the complex behaviors that we observe in nature, but collaborationdarwinI think this COVID crisis is helping us to examine these ideas and ask ourselves if this is how we want to continue living as a species. Because the truth is, if we really make a study of nature, there’s a helluva lot more evidence for cooperation rather than competitition in the endurance of living things. Darwin actually wrote about this but it often goes unnoted.

But whether you are taking about plants (The Hidden Life of Trees  )  or microscopic , single-celled organisms (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life), there is a complicated web of life that is the operating system that runs in the background of all things, from the most mundane elements of Earth (How to Read Water) to the deepest understanding of intelligence (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness). And the fact that our economies are coming to a grinding halt during this pandemic exposes this fault in our thinking of our origins and purpose in life. Economists may have taken Darwin’s principles too far.

However, to not seize this moment in Education would be a terrible blunder. Especially since we now have the world’s attention of how dang important educators are in our societies. We really can’t go back to “business as usual” when our doors reopen. We need to be looking deeply into ourselves and asking if this world paradigmn that we live in is the world we want to continue into our future.

We’ve been granted a second chance.

Will we take it?

Needless to say, this is bigger than technology. It’s not about the level of preparedness that educators had when walking into remote learning. We could focus on that but I think we should be looking at the glaring equity issues we have–survival of the fittest–if you had access to technology and wifi, you got to continue your education online. If you didn’t, schools either were temporarily canceled or teachers made packets of uninspiring worksheets that put your brain to sleep–and ultimately got burned in a trash heap since districts were too afraid to have teachers actually grade them for the fear of spreading the virus. All that “school work” went up in flames. Ironic and metaphorical at the same time.

There’s this part of Darwin’s theory of Evolution that we should focus on. Adaptation: a change in a behavior or physical feature that improves a living thing’s ability to survive.  If we superimpose this concept onto culture, we call it innovation.

Innovation is often considered to be a value. But I don’t think so. It’s a necessity in my mind, a conscious decision. Natural selection is only one form of evolution but change can be also be a choice. That is where innovation comes in.

In the course, New Learning: Principles and Patterns of Pedagogy , Dr. William Cope reminds us that “

I share these thoughts of Dr. Cope to demonstrate how important this time is to reflect and consider WHAT’S NEXT in our human paradigm and our role to consciously decide as educators how we can support this transition to new ways of thinking and living in our world. I believe that as we move through this pandemic, we will also have a crisis of the heart and mind as we grapple with how we might use this opportunity to innovate in Education and embrace new ways of doing “school”. We can use the power of formal education to steer humanity in a new direction.

An Einstein Approach

Just as we are awakening to the ridiculousness of “standardizing” our students with testing, let’s not make the shallow mistake to make this about apps and tech. It’s much more primal and significant than that.

Albert Einstein once said:

einstein problems.jpeg

So, if our thinking has gotten us into our mess, then we have to revise it.  Education plays a crucial role in this.

The truth is that living things are exposed to disease all the time. That’s not new.

But we deem this a crisis because it has changed our way of living. And that may not be a bad thing in the long game if we get to eradicate the wrongful premise that the only way to survive is at the expense of others.

Because what the scientific evidence is now demonstrating is that it’s our relationships that helps us to solve-problems (code word: adaptation). And doing this TOGETHER will be the only way through this situation. We can not simply survive but we can thrive if we stop doing the same things and thinking in the same ways that got us here.

And, if we don’t want to be “same-same, but different” (same content but with a splash more of technology in there for good measure), then we need to look critically at our curricular content and school structures, while asking if it is truly serving a higher purpose for living beings, big and small. We have the power to choose this.

So, it is in the spirit of Nature’s truth that begs us to rethink schools and rebuild our world.

So what if we got Darwin all wrong?

Here is some of my first thinking what should be the basis of new standards in Education.

  1. Empathy should become a part of our content because it helps us to understand the relationship we have to our world.  We don’t read and write to pass a test, we do it to connect with the world.
  2. As a skill, explicit teaching of cooperation and collaboration should become the new “norm” in our school.
  3. Grades are an artifact of “selection of the fittest” thinking in which we rank and value our students based upon their academic knowledge. It’s an artificial and inhumane way to evaluate students. We need to stop this practice.
  4. No more, dog eat dog: content should include a new paradigmn in which we highlight peace and inter-relationships. How to solve conflict is an essential skill.
  5. Moreover, social emotional learning isn’t fluff. It’s a vital for developing human competence.
  6. Sharing is not just caring, it is an essential component to life. All life. So, the circular economy and sharing economy shouldn’t be a fringe idea, it should be a guiding principle.
  7. Awareness and appreciation of intelligence is not just a human thing. It’s in ALL things and when we recognize it, we can transform our life experience.

So, I want to restate what I said earlier:

We really can’t go back to “business as usual” when our doors reopen. We need to be looking deeply into ourselves and asking if this world paradigmn that we live in is the world we want to continue into our future.

We’ve been granted a second chance.

Will we take it?

Let’s set the world rightside up. We have the power to do that in Education.

 

 

 

 

 

Click. Learn. Create.

Click. Learn. Create.

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I live in a world of curiosity, surrounded by buoyant imaginations and inquisitive minds. I forget what it’s like in the “real world”. But this past week my sister had her birthday and what I thought was a simple project of curating loving videos was an absolutely enlightening experience of how others perceive technology and use it. A continuum of fear, with arrogant ignorance at one level: “Don’t know, don’t care to know”-ness and vain helplessness at the other with “I don’t want to look stupid so I won’t try”-ness.  I made how-to videos for making a video using Facebook Messenger (the very app we were communicating in!), and yet the willingness to do it wasn’t there.  It was fascinating to bear witness to this.  No one was willing to simply click on a button and give it a go.

Now you could say that this is a generational issue–“It’s those Baby Boomers!” Maybe…but I think it’s a mindset issue. It’s a lack of interest and desire to move beyond our comfort level. It’s a fear of failure. And all of us “Digital Immigrants” suffer from it.

I feel strongly that all of us, young or old, must embrace David Higginson’s motto: Click. Learn. Create. We have to be open to exploring different technologies and apps. Not because we have to be experts in everything, but we have to be more playful and less rigid in our beliefs about ourselves and what we can do. We need to get comfortable with making mistakes.

Personally, I like to challenge myself with technology, creating a podcast was just “for fun”. This website was created just “for fun”. I wanted to learn more about these things and researched and played around. For the past few months, I’ve been teaching myself about how to create online courses and all those things that are entailed in it. It’s been a journey of exploring all the learning management systems and the ways content can be created for it. I’m loving the challenge. But moving from a curiosity into creation seems like the longest journey ever. And it isn’t because of what’s possible with tech. It’s because of my mindset.

In my head, I hear of a litany of “What If” worst-case scenarios: What if it’s crap? What if I pick the wrong platform? What if I could design this better? ….etc….it’s all the same self-berating message that boils down to “I’m not good enough.” I think, this culturally programmed message of perfection paralyzes me at times, and I have to will myself to overcome my anxiety. But as awful as I feel sometimes, it is absolutely joyful when I encounter someone who has another piece of the puzzle and this gives me the courage to continue. I may move slowly, but I still move forward.

learningBut this IS learning. Learning isn’t just about acquiring knowledge and skills. It’s about becoming a better version of ourselves. Me 2.0 It’s about surprising ourselves with what we can do. It’s about connecting and collaborating with others with purpose and passion. And most importantly, it’s about growing ourselves emotionally so we can be mature, sensitive and happy human beings. One of my friends, Graham Baines, would call this #SeriousFun.

 

Even the smallest efforts can lead to transformational gains in our personal and professional development. I wish for all of us to Click. Learn. Create. so that we may Discover. Inspire. Empower.

 

 

DigitalLunch: How to Bring an End to Poverty (#TeachSDGs) using Google’s Blogger App

DigitalLunch: How to Bring an End to Poverty (#TeachSDGs) using Google’s Blogger App

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To imagine this goal- ending poverty in all its forms everywhere- seems like humankind would need to make a mighty effort to bring this into reality. However, I felt inspired by the research presented by Peter Diamandis in his book, Abundance, the Future is Better Than You Think. Extreme-Poverty-OurWorldIn his book, he presents really interesting data that shows that current efforts are making an impact, helping people get out of “absolute poverty” or extreme poverty which are defined as income levels that are below the minimum amount to sustain people’s basic needs. Although this is a dreadful situation, I believe as educators, we should convey a sense of optimism to our students–that WE can be the Change, while bringing them into awareness of the issue and compel them to eradicate it.

If we are to take on the challenge of teaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), then we can look to the work done by UNESCO to find learning objectives that we may embed into our current curriculum. They suggest to create a conceptual understanding of extreme and relative poverty and to critically reflect on the underlying cultural and behavioral practices that create these conditions. Furthermore, it should be our intention to connect the head to the heart, adding social-emotional learning objectives so that students begin to show sensitivity to the issues of poverty as well as empathy and solidarity with poor people and those in vulnerable situations. (Education for Sustainable Goals). I believe wholeheartedly we can do this, and I’d like to suggest using the Google App Blogger to cultivate knowledge of the local, national and global distribution of extreme poverty and extreme wealth.  In my opinion, student blogs can be a great way to chronicle their learning journey because they combine both traditional writing skills with the new literacy skill of visual messages as students create reflections and powerful posts that respond to their deepening understanding. 

Here are some of the basic reasons why I would use Blogger:

  • Free and easy to set up–all you need is a Gmail account.
  • Simple and easy to use its features.
  • Autosaves their work as a draft, and they can go back in “history” to review changes.
  • Can be used as an individual or collaborative blog
  • Great context for important problem-solving, critical thinking and cultural awareness.
  • Has the opportunity for an authentic audience experience.
  • Transforms students of “consumers” into “creators” of media.

My Personal Recommendations….

  • When you have the students sign up Blogger, make sure they DO NOT sign up for the G+ platform or it will not allow the blog to get set up if they are under 13 years old.
  • Make sure you have Admin privileges on the students’ accounts, so you can have editing privileges and can moderate comments.

Click on the video below if you are ready to learn  How to Create a Blog for Student Learning Using Blogger.  (If you are already familiar with Blogger, then you can continue to read how we could use to blogging to journey students through an inquiry into poverty…… )

 

Okay, so now that you have a general sense of the power of blogging in learning and how you can get started using Blogger, I’d like to provide some ideas of how you use the blog to show growth in their understanding of issues surrounding poverty, in their local and community and globally.

Suggested Provocations:

  1. Watching the film Living On One Dollar . Also, there are a ton of resources on that website and additional work done by the filmmakers. By the way, not an easy documentary to watch–will evoke strong emotions.  (I’m tearing up just thinking about it.)
  2. Field Trip to the Landfill. What does the trash tell us about the wealth in our community?  Depending on where you live in the world, you may actually bare witness to people who are living in extreme poverty.
  3. A ride on the local bus through impoverished neighborhoods. In some places, just the bus ride alone can be quite an eye-opener to the people who live in poverty. I would add the See, Think and Wonder thinking routine to this excursion.
  4. Student Challenge: What might it be like living on 1 USD a day?

Blogging about these experiences will be illuminating and can be done either in-class or for home learning. Here are some possible blog prompts:

blog prompts.png

I would also recommend that students read and respond to each other’s blogs using the comment feature. No matter the age-group, I think a review of what constitutes a helpful comment would be a smart idea. I would NEVER assume students understand the complexity of netiquette. In first grade, these were some of the “starters” we gave them to help guide appropriate responses: Helpful Comments. Perhaps those might provide a guide on how you might want students to engage with each other online.

These suggestions, as well as the blog prompts, are merely the beginning of what could be possible. If you go to the TeachSDGs website, you can find more resources and ideas. The great thing is that students could share their blog posts on social media platforms to further spread the message of the SDGs as well as be a resource to others grade levels within our school communities or across the globe.

If you have any feedback, I’d really appreciate how you felt about this information:

 

*This is the 1st of our Digital Lunch series, in which using Google Apps for Education training was used to support teaching the Sustainable Development Goals put forth by the United Nations. In this lunch hour training sessions, participates were exposed to SDG #1: No Poverty and the digital tool of Blogger. This blog post gives an overview of the training.

#IMMOOC: Why the Status Quo Makes Us Slow and Stupid

#IMMOOC: Why the Status Quo Makes Us Slow and Stupid

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My student stood agog: “Wow, you type so fast! How do you do that?” I looked down at my keyboard and then back at my student. Do I even bother to explain the QWERTY keyboard set up and how I learned to type to my 1st grader? I mean, will the keyboard even exist in the future? Will touch-typing even be a relevant skill?

It’s odd to think that the QWERTY keyboard is an excellent example of why we need to look at common things with uncommon sight. Why innovation is so vital in our educational systems. Have you ever heard of the Fable of the Keys? Do you know why we have that layout of letters of the home keys? Perhaps you think it was created to improve our speed and efficiency when typing? NO–quite the opposite. It was to slow us down so that those old fashion typewriter keys didn’t get jammed up. Its crazy to think that in an era of such technological impact, that such a simple feature of our computers cannot be revamped to improve our productivity. It’s a bit foolish really that we haven’t adopted another style of the keyboard when you think of it. And it makes me wonder what else we are doing in our world that is relies on 200-year-old technology.

Again, I wonder if the layout of the keyboard of our laptops and devices should be reconfigured to produce faster typing speeds? That’s the most sensible approach, right? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I think about this provocative quote about innovation:Anytime teachers think differently about (3)

And it makes sense, right? Why would we spend all that time and effort when we could be reimagining how we might capture thoughts and ideas? Most of us submit that talk to text will be the way of the future. But I wonder how often in education we just repackage these same sorts of “old” ideas which have gotten standardized into our systems. When you look at the quote by Seymour Papert, a man who brought technology to education, can you think of anything that you are using or doing in your classroom that just recapitulates antiquated practices?

The phrase “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dullest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a Skinner box.   –Seymour Papert, father of Constructionism

During Season 4, Episode 3 of IMMOOC, John Spencer described his journey with technology and how his thinking has evolved around its use. As I listened to him speaking about using Scotch tape to mend microfiche, my head just kept unconsciously nodding. Oh, how I could relate! And I wholeheartedly agree with his lesson from this experience.

What is transferable, what is powerful and what stayed forever has been getting to think critically, getting to be creative, getting to problem solve-all of that. To me, when people get focused on the technology, they are going to end up inevitably doing is getting obsessed with the novelty.

I think this is an important lesson for all of us educators to consider. How can we focus on transferable skills vs. technology skills? Is knowing how to touch-type going to be a game changer for my 1st grader’s future OR is understanding how we organize and create systems to improve our capacity to do more and communicate more of our best selves and solve problems the answer?

Obviously, my question is rhetorical. And maybe you are wondering what “QUERTYs” you have in your school culture and classrooms–what old fashion practices and tools are you perpetuating, with or without the use of technology? Let’s start to make genuine progress by challenging and “breaking” them. Because by accepting the “status quo” in education, like un-imagining “the keyboard”, just makes us look slow and stupid.

#SOL: Looking Through a Window of An Open House

#SOL: Looking Through a Window of An Open House

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As I locked the door and closed all the curtains, I wondered what emotions were stirring in the children – were they excited, were they nervous, or were they blase to share their learning?

heiyun
Where is MY planning sheet?

Today was their opportunity to present their knowledge and efforts in our unit, how did that make them feel?

 

At three o’clock, another door swings open and a head of a beaming student pops in, “Can I come in, Ms. Judy? Can I show my mom?”. I look up at the clock. “It’s 3pm.  Time to get started! Come on in!-What are you going to present to your mom first? Can you find your planning sheet?”

 

pierre
Showing how to use Book Creator app. 

 

Before you know it,  students start piling in with their loved ones: moms, dads, brothers, aunts, and grandmas–they all show up to see what their child has been up to in 1st Grade.The noise of the activity is fun to observe. We start grabbing iPads to document the interactions.  We want the parents to remember this moment, this moment of wonder and curiosity; hopefully a proud moment, a moment when they realize that their baby is growing up, a moment when pride wells up inside.

As we look on, some of the interactions are gorgeous. “C’mon”, squeaks one girl. “I want to show you how to play this game. It’s called BANG!”

sophia
Playing a Word Game.

Enthusiasm has flooded the room. It is four o’clock and a desire to show off their favorite things in class has yet to cease after an hour.

 

We asked students to choose five things to present to their families–touching a bit on math, language, technology, and unit. One girl has checked off the entire list. We tried to avoid this from happening since we know that the adult’s time is busy. One mother struggles to get her daughter to stop playing a game.

thomas and charlotte
Playing the “Sound Detective” Game.

“This is the last round, okay?”, she beseeches.

 

Over in the corner, a sort of game of tug-of-war seems to be in process, in which there is a tension between their interaction, as a loved one is challenging and pulling out the learning from their child, questioning and critical. The child pulls back with counter arguments and claims, then relents. These interactions are difficult to watch from the eyes of a child, but the teacher in me also feels a bit grateful for the pressure that is being applied, hoping that it will make the student more focused in their work. (Today I will find out who has really won this game–has this really changed any habits or behaviors?)

kathyIt’s 4:30. Students start to come back to me to report that they have finished.  As they hand me their planning sheets, I direct a question towards them, “How do you feel about presenting your learning?” Most smile and reply, “Good!”.  I give a high five. I want them to have some small acknowledgeable that what they did today mattered. That the learning they have done up until now and the effort they put into presenting it was important. As I look up to say my goodbyes and thank yous to loved ones, in my head I am wondering and hoping that this experience opened a window into the lives of the learners; that the parents and family members gained some valuable insight and perspective into their unique and wonder-filled child. In my heart, I am hoping that the learners left feeling a sense of pride and recognition; that this has further developed their confidence and self-esteem.

It’s nearly six o’clock before I leave school, exhausted yet content.

My Flawed Thinking: Confessions of A Digital Immigrant

My Flawed Thinking: Confessions of A Digital Immigrant

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Perhaps you haven’t considered lately how far we’ve come in the journey with computers in the classroom. I recently was watching an interview with Hal Abelson about the history of Logo, the first computer programming language that was taught to kids. In it, he shares the philosophy of Logo and the determination that the father of constructionism, Seymour Papert, had in bringing computers into the classroom:

Well, one thing I learned from Seymour Papert is that he used to talk about developing technology with a low floor and a high ceiling, meaning it’s easy to get started, the low floor, and you can do more and more sophisticated things over time, a high ceiling. We sometimes also talk about having wide walls, meaning you can have many different pathways. It’s not enough just to have everyone doing the same thing and doing more complex things, but people doing different types of things.

I know Hal is talking about computer programming, but that is only one aspect of how we use computers and devices in our learning environments. It is fascinating to think about what an impact these pioneers have had in creating a generation of “digital natives”. Once a computer was a huge expensive noisy machine, but now it ubiquitous. Our young learners have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computer video games, digital MP3 players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other tools of the digital age. As an enthusiastic educator,  it’s hard not be inspired by where technology has taken us and where it will take us in our students’ learning.  I am always searching for how we might cultivate deeper thinking and creativity in our use of iPads in the learning to demonstrate this “high ceiling”. However, I recently discovered that I have some preconceived notions about my digital natives. The cartoon really summarizes my error in thinking and that I need to appreciate that, although technology can provide this low ceiling, I have to still lead them into the “learning environment”–even if I am a Digital Immigrant.  

During this last week of learning, we have been working through the transdisciplinary theme, How We Organize Ourselves, inquiring into the central idea: Community Spaces provide people with opportunities to connect. We have developed “expert” groups for different community spaces at our school and it came up that we may need some signs to help us know about the appropriate behavior in different areas. So we considered how technology can help us to augment or extend the learning by this project and decided to use Adobe Spark Post to explore how we might create the visual message.  However, I noticed that the students are accustomed to using iPads just for consumption purposes instead of using them for creativity or collaboration. Before we can shift into higher levels of purposeful use in the classroom, they need to get into habits of taken active roles as learners of technology. They required a lot of handholding to start the project and I began to think how I might have given them more support in orientating to the app before beginning. Even though it wasn’t a total flop, I wanted a lesson “do-over” so that students could make better connections and be empowered. With this in mind, I recognized my faulty logic in assuming that because they are digital natives, they are naturally orientated to using apps. I started to think about what my next steps need to be and how might I approach it differently.

After reflecting, I see these as the basic concepts and ideas that they need further development in:

Learn….

  • What do different icons mean?
  • How to problem solve when they can’t spell a word?

Understand….

  • How their projects are seen and can be shared on the device (co-use and collaborate).
  • How that double tapping is an editing command.
  • That changes made on a project happen in real time.
  • A design can be improved upon and their current model or idea is just one iteration.

In hindsight, these outcomes seem like a natural starting point and should have been obvious in the lesson design;  but as a digital immigrant, I think they implicitly know how to get started with technology. I assumed that so much of their experience has exposed them to these things and thought that the app could teach itself. My design checklist and quick demonstration of the app was simply not enough to draw out the nuances that students needed to develop when creating a product. If I want them to go into higher levels of their learning and creativity, I have to remember that, although I am not a digital native, I am their teacher and I need to make sure they have a clear picture of the power of the tool before them. There’s a careful balance of making sure that students are finding problems that they can solve, and that they have the skills to use technology to solve these problems.

I am sure my confession resonates with many educators, as they think back to a lesson that should have gone better than it did. But sometimes you do the teaching and sometimes you do the learning. (:

10 Reasons Why I Can’t Wait to Teach 1st Grade Next Year

10 Reasons Why I Can’t Wait to Teach 1st Grade Next Year

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My school year is winding down–4 more weeks left of school! (but not that I’m counting) And instead of thinking about all the great adventures we will have this summer, all I can think about is how much fun I am going to have to teach 1st grade next year. Teacher Nerd ALERT!next year After bobbing back and forth between the Early Years and 4th grade for the last couple years, I will be happy to settle in 1st grade for a while, where you get the best of the Early Years mindset (unfettered creativity and imagination) and yet starting to gain confidence and competence in Literacy and Numeracy skills, making it possible to go deep with developing their knowledge and thinking skills. Plus their minds aren’t as sullied with “can’ts” as the older grades are, making them so wonderfully teachable. Oh, the joy of learning!-for both me and them.

Here are the 10 things that are keeping me up at night that I am so dang excited to do with 1st graders:

  1. Meditation: Cultivating calm in one’s mind should be a skill taught early in life. If I was being honest, I have been a bit chicken to really make it a part of my classroom routine in a serious way. But I really intend to push myself and introduce mindfulness and meditation in a more intentional way. I think 6-7 years old can manage a brief moment of calm.   
  2. Book Snaps: Although I am not sure about introducing SnapChat to little ones, how I do love this idea by Tara Martin, in which kids take a “snap” of the book they are reading and post the questions, ideas, and quotes from the book as annotations. I think the excitement of posting these “book snaps” are a unique way to cultivate an interest in close reading when you share them in a public forum. Love of close reading–oh yeah, let’s do that!
  3. Podcasting: I dabbled with podcasting before but for the last couple months, I have taken a serious interest in it and have been working on my a personal podcast for a while. Audio content is a whole other art form so this project has really made me think a lot about creativity, word choice, and voice (literally). Which is preciously why I want to do with little kids, and I was inspired by an idea that the music teacher shared with me about read alouds. So I’m hoping to do read alouds of books and their writing and publish it to an authentic audience, all the while nailing fluency in the process.
  4. Blogging: The online world is where most of my digital natives will be probably making their greatest impact as they grow into adults. I’ve always admired the philosophy of the Writer’s Workshop as it develops the mindset of a writer. What could be more authentic and meaningful as a blog, as they articulate their ideas online?
  5. SeeSaw: I have been dying to seriously mess around with digital portfolios. Currently, we use Class Dojo, which is focused more on classroom management, but SeeSaw has oh so much more going on and has a lot more opportunity for engagement and interaction.
  6. Math Workshop: Did I mention that I like the workshop model? Ah, yes, and it works for math too! Workshop + Talk Moves + Math Tools = a deeper exploration of number concepts.
  7. Math as Art: Okay, I’m a math geek, but through a series of serendipitous events, I’ve come to see art as an integral way to show the “beauty” of math. I don’t consider myself arty, at all, but I’m super interested in how we can represent math (and science) in artistic ways.
  8. Number Talks: This is probably one of my favorite things, ever, in developing mathematical mindsets, in which students get to explore a myriad of perspectives as they look at solving a problem.  So, it creates a bank of strategies for mental math and develops mathematical fluency.  If you don’t know about it, check out the video below.

9. Design Thinking: Have you ever found that you thought you knew something but then as you start really working through it and researching it, you realize how absolutely ignorant you are. Well, design thinking has done that to me, and I want to use it more often in my classroom, not as a one-off in a STEM-like unit, but I think it can be superimposed into so many aspects of learning, even writing. I want to launch it early in my class and use it often, whether we are going through the design process or doing design sprints.

10. Writer’s Workshop: Although I am not a die-hard Lucy Calkins fan, I so do love this approach to writing because it creates “authors” with writing that is worth sharing and publishing. They get to study good writing, practice these devices, go through the writing process and get peer feedback. I think it cultivates a practice of deep reading of a text and cultivates a positive mindset about writing, dare I say a buzz about their writing. I want to remix this model a bit, with the use of technology and design-based learning through. So I reckon that this experiment will be the fodder for blogs later.

If you are a 1st-grade teacher, I’m wondering what you really love challenging your students with. What am I missing? What have you done that you think is the bee’s knees? I’d love some insight!!

Nevertheless, it is fun to sit upon the precipice of something and feel the exhilaration of possibility.

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If You’re Not Struggling and Embarrassed, then You’re Not Teaching Digital Natives.

If You’re Not Struggling and Embarrassed, then You’re Not Teaching Digital Natives.

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Back in 2006, my 4th-grade colleague, Mr. Glenn patiently tutored me in using wikis and blogs. I gave it a whirl with my students but I really wasn’t very competent in my tech know-how to pull it off. Honestly, it took me YEARS before I’d get back on the horse again. Perhaps you can relate-As a teacher, you always feel like you are racing against the clock, trying to get all the standards taught and using tech just seemed so frivolous, so you forgo its use. I definitely suffered from technophobia as my awkward attempts caused more frustration than bore fruit. However, I didn’t stay marooned on this island for too long, as seeing my daughter engage with technology really compelled me to take a closer look at its use in learning. This blog actually is the outcome of this realization and it has evolved from an exploration and curiosity to my digital professional portfolio to being a reflective tool of my educational interests and practices.

I remember early in my teaching career a well-intentioned high school administrator told me that a “good teacher” can teach anything. I felt like a really terrible teacher for a long while, thinking that I was somehow grossly incompetent because I couldn’t successfully coach volleyball (never played it competitively) or teach Spanish (I studied French). It took me changing schools to see what ridiculous advice this was. But c’mon– Like who can teach cross-stitch or linear algebra without any previous knowledge or training?  Well, let’s just call bulls@#$t on that! And that is why this “good teacher” is a student rather than trying to wing it with a textbook. You cannot teach what you don’t have any experience in, let alone knowledge of.

So, later when I went back to 4th grade I realized that I had been digging up dinosaur bones for too long and avoiding technology. Yes, I could app smash and flip my lessons, but I really wasn’t moving my students from being “consumers” idare to teachnto “creators”, which is what I now define as the purpose of using technology in our classrooms. Plus, I really wanted to move them to the highest use of technology–Connection!-sharing their ideas and finding others in their “tribe” in the digital landscape. How could I possibly teach kids about stuff that I wasn’t actively doing myself? If I was going to get these kids prepared for their future, I had to be a 21st-century learner right along with them. I couldn’t possibly blindly ask them to create something unless I could somehow mentor them. That’s exactly when I started to get serious about blogging.

You see blogging is about one of the most humiliating things you can do, other than getting really smashed at a party and stripping down to your undies. Your ideas and thinking are “naked” and it has the potential to be seen by tons of people. You can sound like an idiot and these online ramblings leave a digital footprint. So, not only can your current boss and colleagues see what kind of fool you are, but your future boss and co-workers can too. But I have to do it because I want to teach to the future and not to the past. The expectations of my students to be creators are going to be higher since being “googleable” is a prerequisite for their job search. There’s no way I can teach them about digital citizenship and managing their online life if all I ever do is post an occasional Facebook update and never become a contributor to the World Wide Web myself. Seriously, how could I actually help them navigate these waters?

Now I’m teaching myself about podcasting. It’s not hard, but it ain’t easy. In case you were thinking about it, there’s all this stuff that you need to know about creating quality sound, editing tracks, uploading it onto feeds and publishing it. Plus you need to have graphic art for your podcast and I have to design a logo and description for it.  Geez! I haven’t used GarageBand in years and it is a heck of a lot more complicated than I remember. I’m harassing our music teacher to tutor me in making audio tracks and how licensing works in the recording world. There’s a lot about copyright that I don’t know about. And writing a script is not the same as writing blog posts, let me tell you. (As an avid podcast listener, it’s annoying to hear aimless talking. My time is precious, so if the podcast is a bunch of blah-blah-blah, then why bother?-right?!) I worked on my podcast this weekend and I sound like such a boob. But it’s my first step. I have to remind myself that everything is hard at first but eventually it gets easier and more fun. However, I’m hopeful that I can take this experience into the classroom. I really want to have my students create podcasts for kids. I think that would be so fun.

So, what about you?–are you rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with all this digital awesomeness or are you hiding behind your whiteboard and 3-ring binder? (No offense, but I see you.) I don’t think our children can afford to have Luddite teachers. Our world needs more courageous and tech-curious educators to not only help prepare them for their future but to help them create the future that they will live in.

 

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